Musings of a madplant
by Blue Jeans
Summary: [Manga based, Millions Knives character study, oneshot] Knives thinks on pain, brotherhood, spiders, and exterminating an entire species... Really now, it's all very simple.


**Note:** Story built from scattered manga scans, memory, and speculation. Trigun characters are taken from the works by Yasuhiro Nightow-san, who we must all thank for creating such complex male and female leads that just makes fanfic authors' fingers itch to crack them open and dig around! These characters are not mine, but this piece of fiction is all from my crazed head. Enjoy!

**Warning:** Despite the title, this missed the humor department by a mile and ended up hitting psycho and angst in one-go. What a combo, eh?

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**Musings of a mad-plant**

_by Blue Jeans_

He doesn't like to feel pain because he remembers, and the fear hits him so hard that he passes out from the dread. He's powerful and almost untouchable, except from the pains inflicted upon him by the only other walking plant on the face of this godforsaken planet. He thinks he knows hate and betrayal better than anyone else. He likes to deal it out and torment that darling brother of his because the other reflects it back at him with every step taken, every step that leads Vash the Stampede farther from Millions Knives - who, despite his name, has not much of anything but raw power and hatred that burns deeply in his heart, though Vash would call it _-fear-_.

The majority of the human race doesn't have a name for Knives, he's not as popular as his twin. That's the way he likes it. He likes to play God to the spiders, and his brother's a fragile butterfly caught within their webs of deceit and cruelty. Knives only wants what's best for Vash. So he deals out these little hurts and little pains, to save the other from the nightmares that haunt Knives. He wants to save Vash from the reality Vash does not wish to face, and to wake the other from such delusional dreams as "Love and Peace." Vash doesn't understand that if given the chance the humans will betray him far more than Knives ever will. Vash doesn't understand that there is no redemption for the spiders, no matter the efforts his brother has already put into redeeming them, _-nothing-_ will change. What the humans are will remain as is, forever. Centuries of history has proven that these spiders have reached the end of their evolutionary cycle. Knives don't see what's wrong with him terminating a stagnant species other than the sentiments he does not share with his brother.

Why, given the chance, they'll just take his darling brother and lock him away. They'll take out sharp little scalpels and tug in the hundred little tubes with murmuring words of reassurance. They'll cut and cut away, limb by limb and turn a silent ear to Vash's screams, as they have done to the screams of all his other brother- and sister-plants. They'll end what they started years ago, and do to them what they did to...

Knives shudders at the memories. He doesn't want to ever go there but the place is familiar in his mind and memories. The sad and empty eyes that looks to him from the past, from that old screen on an old ship, that luminescent light in the darkness, still beckons him on nights when he is not careful. He remembers the way the small hands and arms and legs floated in the liquid container, how her dead eyes haunts him in his nightmarish memories. The cruelties dealt onto him by the spiders seemed like nothing to the torture _-she-_ must have undergone and endured. His fear of pain and the spiders rushes up then, at the memories of her helpless anguish. The blank and dispassionate gaze is a ghost that will not leave him, a reminder he wishes to forget as much as he fears to lose sight of. That hopelessness seems to linger longest when he is experiencing pain, and it is this one reason why that makes him hate it so much more.

Knives is afraid of pain, the implied little deaths that make living so much more unbearable eats away his resolve. It's a dismembering feeling that takes him that much closer to the dead plant in that tube, always waiting for him to revisit in the long ago past like the specter that it is. He's afraid of how inescapable it is. It tears him to pieces how he could, in a single moment, live that much closer to the terror she must have experienced while the spiders ripped off her wings and her limbs. He remembers the betrayal he had felt when he had looked to see such familiar faces look so impassively on as one of his own kind cried unheard and unseen tears in the face of their unsympathetic gazes. He doesn't understand, how after so many years and having witnessed such similar tortures over and over again, Vash could still forgive.

Oh, his darling, ignorant, stupid and naively innocent little brother...

Sometimes he wants to smash the truth into that thick, familiar skull. Those moments never last, and when his temper passes, he looks on and wonders again at how his brother, who is so similar, could forgive the unforgivable. How could Vash forget when the footprints of the past lead onwards to such a familiar future?

Knives does not like to be made a fool. He doesn't believe kindness and forgiveness should be given out so freely, though once he had given it as much and as blindly as Vash was handing it out now. He doesn't trust Rem or the memories of her because her actions made her a traitor. He believes humans are spiders and plants are butterflies, as simply put as ever before but to him the fact has not changed in the least. And if given the chance, he'll tell Vash that once upon a time, there was a spider named Rem, who fattened them up on lies and make-believe so that when it was their time to be inside that tube, they'd smile the way _-she-_ had smiled and believed the way _-she-_ had believed...

"Let's do it for _-Love and Peace-_, little butterflies," the spiders would surely say - as once they have said before. "Let's tear out one wing at a time, one limb, bit by bit..." and oh how they would float and flutter.

But Knives is not a fool, he has learned the truth. He'll kill them first before they even try. This butterfly won't die so easily and he won't be grateful or smile so bewildered and betrayed. He will never be food for the spiders, and if it takes killing all the spiders in the world to save his brother from that fate, he'd do it. He'd do it with a smile.

**The end**

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Okay, in less than a week, I've written for 3 different Manga and 2 of them I've never even touched before - though not from lack of trying... I think this current madness is catching though. I always thought Knives was a very interesting a character (though he didn't interest me as much in the anime as he did when I read more of him in the pieces of manga I was able to get my hands on). This is before Knives reunited with Vash again, and as much as I like a redeemed Knives - as I belong to the masses of spiders - I find most redemption fics to be somewhat... unfathomable and unrealistic. But that's just me... I mean, he's insanity is rather attractive from my writer's pov. Right now, I'm also working my way through the other "monsters" (a.k.a. villains) of other manga - currently, anime is kinda boring me a bit. Itachi (in Naruto) is next in line... and I think I'd like a crack at Soujirou (in Rurouni Kenshin), and maybe flay and abuse away the romantic version out there for our dear, deluded Enishi (also, Rurouoni Kenshin). Ah, I love the mind of a sociopath!

The thoughts are still pretty scattered, I had a few ideas and assumptions on Knives, I don't know if they all stacked up nicely together or not, but this is the end result. I like the ending most, fits him nicely, and if I listen just right... the voices in my head makes it sound nice and creepy!

Hahaha! Hoped you enjoyed!

_- blue_


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